Not Comic Or A Relief

THE American Civil Liberties Union's offer to take over the Justice Department, which you editorially viewed as comic relief, is not comic nor a source of relief for many of us.

The ACLU offer can be favorably compared to a bid by a fox to guard the henhouse for a farmer.

Somehow, in the name of justice, the ACLU has managed to become notorious for its ability to mitigate or bar the punishment of criminal predators by uncovering mechanical loopholes in the law, thus denying justice for the victims of crime.

Perhaps the most infamous exploit of the ACLU was its ardent defense, in a thrust for justice, of the ''rights'' of the American neo-Nazis to further traumatize the victims of Nazi concentration camps by a ''show of strength'' in the small Chicago suburb where many of the survivors had sought refuge.

The Weimar Republic of Germany also sanctioned such ''shows of strength'' and was rewarded by being abolished two months after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

It appears that the ACLU ardently argues about the vagaries of ''precedents'' for a future at risk, and naively ignores the dangerous realities of the present.